Introduction

For our first day back in 2019 we decided to do a simple Paper folding program.

It doesn’t really fold paper though, it just shows you how thick the paper gets when you keep folding it in half! It will get very thick quite quickly!

So we Googled, how thick is a sheet of Paper and we got the number 0.1mm, so quite thin really!

We then Googled a list of items and their heights, so we could write out a message when we reached that height, this was the list we came up with [and a guess of how many folds it would take]:

Paper: 0.1mm

Baby: 530mm

Human: 2 Meters [50]

Dublin Spire: 121m

Croagh Patrick: 764m

Burj Khaleefa: 828m [10,000]

Carauntoohill: 1038m [1 billion]

Mount Everest: 8848m

Galway to America: 6603km [25]

Space: 100km

Moon:300,000km

Mars: 56,000,000 km

Sun: 150,000,000 km

Pluto: 7,500,000,000 KM

The Program

In order to keep track of how many folds we have done and what height the paper has reached we needed a few variables:

We store the number of folds, and the height in mm, meters and kilometers.

folds – to store how many times we have folded the paper

mm – to store the height in milimetres

metre – to store the height in metres

km – to store the height in kilometres

We then made sure that they were all set to the correct value when the Green Flag was clicked.

The only one that is not zero is the height in mm which we set the thickness of paper 0.1

Now we can get coding.

We used the Up and Down arrows to fold/unfold the Paper, this would increase/decrease the number of folds and the mm height and then Broadcast to the code that checked everything else.

The code that does the checking needs a few IF’s to work out what to do. First of all though it needs to calculate the height in Metres and Kilometres as well.

We used the number of folds to work out if we should be checking the mm, metre or km variable. All we did when we got to a particular height was to Say something on the Screen, but you could do anything you want at these points in the code, maybe show a different sprite or make a sound or something.

This is the code that checked the mm and metre variables

and this is the code that checked the metre and km variables

And if anyone wants the full project, it is availabe on the scratch.mit.edu web site:

You all did great work on Saturday, there was some quite complex thinking to be done to figure it out but you did great!

the player picks a level of difficulty and the computer chooses 2 random numbers to add (subtract or multiply- whichever you choose!) together and show the numbers to the player. Fr this we needed 2 SPRITES and 4 VARIABLES called SCORE, LEVEL, NUMBER1 and NUMBER2 as well as 2 BACKDROPS.

The player then has to enter an answer to the equation and the computer tells them whether they are wrong or right.

We repeated the ask/answer questions 5 or 10 times. Can you figure out where the REPEAT loop fits?

We also had a second sprite who reacted positively to correct answers BROADCAST and negatively to wrong answers BROADCAST. You can use whatever sprites you like and change their look whatever way you like. One coder added a puppy as their second and had him bark whenever an answer was correct.

After all the questions were asked we had the 1st Sprite SAY – Game Over! and BROADCAST Game over so that the backdrop changed and music played. There are two ways to change the backdrop- see below!CDA-S8-Week_9_18-MathsGame.pdfCan you improve our game??! Can you figure out how to subtract or multiply instead of add? Can you get the computer to add three numbers together or give the user 3 level options like: easy, medium or hard? The notes for the Maths Game are here:

This week, I helped Bo Peep found her sheep! Some of you did the same and some used ideas like Minecraft Steve finding Iron Ore and Diamonds, Knights finding dragons or a Princess finding flowers.

Before we even started our game this week we talked a little bit about File Management and about the importance of keeping your files somewhere you can access them quickly and giving them a meaningful name.

So to this end, we all created a folder where we will be keeping our files in the future and within that we had a sub folder for this weeks files.

We started our game by drawing our background on our stage:

Unfortunately, due to internet problems we could not search the internet for images for our Sprites, but we could still use the sprites from the Scratch Library.

This week, we decided to move our main sprite using the arrow keys. For this we had to learn a small bit about the X and Y axis and I gave you a little tip on how to remember which is which!

Hope you all enjoyed this week, aee you next week when we will be starting a new game!

Wow! what a fantastic turnout on Saturday again, 79 ninjas in the room! plus a few adults!

I hope you had a good time, I know that I really enjoyed it. There was a really great atmosphere and energy in the room.

A special thank you to Mentor Julia for getting 14 loaner laptops working for us this week, so that everyone that wanted to participate, could. Another thank you to the other Mentors in the room, Eoin and Ruaidhrí, it makes my job easy when they can get around the room and help out when needed. You are doing a great job.

One of the first things we must do before we start anything is make a plan.

We quickly learn when we begin our coding that it is very important to test our code as we go along. Making mistakes is good, but we must learn from them by spotting them (testing) and fixing them.